A few days ago, I was transfixed by a documentary about the many ways Cuba is boosting its internal food production. One of them is the growing use of highly productive organic allotments found between tower blocks and all sorts of land that would be otherwise unused. Cuba has over 7000 urban allotments know as “organopinics” — around 40,000 hectares. These organopinics are green, use waste and feed whole communities for mere pesos. What a great idea!
How do they do it? Cuba imported global organic expertise and is celebrated for its use of permaculture. Permaculture uses complementary planting and biological techniques to reduce digging and to make it easier to produce crops. Instead of monoculture, where one uniform homogenous crop is grown, interplanting makes it easier to avoid pests and to maintain soil fertility. Organic waste such as vegetable peelings is composted and used to restore soil nutrients. Worm bins are particularly important. The worms accelerate the breakdown of compost, turning waste into horticultural gold.
That isn't Cuba's only commitment to being green. While US President George Bush attempted to derail international action on climate change, Cuba has been a world leader. It was one of the first countries to sign the Convention on Climate Change and its successor the Kyoto Protocol. The country was one of the first to move to low energy light bulbs to cut CO2 emissions.
While Cuba now swaps oil with Venezuela in exchange for health care, it has developed renewable energy on a large scale, including solar and wind generated electricity. In March, Cuba’s deputy minister for industry, Jose Manuel, told the Cuban Society for the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources and Environmental Respect that Cuba had saved the equivalent of one million tons of oil in 2006 and 2007.
As Michael Moore's film: Capitalism - a love story exposes the pitfalls of capitalism where 90% of the wealth is held by 10% of the people and employees are referred to as 'dead peasants' – greed is not good! Capitalism as we know it is unsustainable. By creating unsustainable consumer patterns in industrialised countries and sowing impossible dreams throughout the rest of the world, the developed capitalist system has caused great injury to mankind. It has poisoned the atmosphere and depleted its enormous non-renewable natural resources, which we'll need in the future.
But as Cuba shows, an eco-socialist model does work. Other Latin American countries are following its ethos of consume less, share more, be happy. Perhaps we should follow its example?
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